Tag: world

The Net isn’t terribly good as movies go, but it is more real, more current, than I suspected two decades ago. Our feelings about these changes were mirrored in the movies as fear and beguilement-a bunch of rubes trying to make sense of this darned technology eager to eat our minds. The internet is still eating our minds-and now, more than ever, the movies themselves. Dozens of recent movies dramatize the act of vanishing down the internet’s rabbit holes, into the gloss of a digitally manipulated life. The sequel to 2015’s slick, unnerving horror movie Unfriended will travel to the Dark Web, where the most ghoulish, Bitcoin-backed corners of the internet spring to life, and, eventually, bring death. All of these movies are products of a world that isn’t necessarily afraid of the internet-just obsessed with it. Movies about the consequences of the internet aren’t new, exactly. It has zapped movies of an inherent power-the ability to transport, to reinvent or recontextualize what’s possible in the world.

A few months ago, on a college tour, our 18-year-old son announced that he had found his purpose and future career: He wants to do stand-up comedy. The fact is, he’s got some talent in this area. He’s comfortable onstage, he’s a great physical comedian, he can do accents, he’s charming and funny. At the same time, at 18, he’s undisciplined, he’s a procrastinator, and he gets debilitating migraine headaches when he is sleep-deprived, dehydrated, malnourished, or stressed. Thankfully, he’s not saying, “Mom, I’m skipping college and heading to New York City, and I want you to support me financially while I pursue this dream.” He wants to go to a small college, take theater and writing classes, and take advantage of opportunities to be funny onstage during the “Safe” years of college. He’s passionate about comedy and thoughtful about how much risk he can tolerate. In the world you both live in, there are people just like your son who have talent and drive and eventually find success doing the very thing they love most. Even if your son doesn’t become the next Chris Rock or Jerry Seinfeld, he can leverage his charisma and confidence onstage and his ability to write well and make people laugh into a range of professions that seek those skills: public speaker, trial litigator, advertising copywriter, professor, sitcom writer, or entrepreneur, to name just a few.

One problem with his Otto example, Clark thinks, is that it can suggest that a mind becomes extended only when the ordinary brain isn’t working as it should and needs a supplement-something like a hearing aid for cognition. As the years passed, and better devices became available, and people started relying on their smartphones to bolster or replace more and more mental functions, Clark noticed that the idea of an extended mind had come to seem almost obvious. After the paper was published, Clark began thinking that the extended mind had ethical dimensions as well. What you saw was not just a signal from the eye, say, but a combination of that signal and the brain’s own ideas about what it expected to see, and sometimes the brain’s expectations took over altogether. To Clark, predictive processing described how mind, body, and world were continuously interacting, in a way that was mostly so fluid and smoothly synchronized as to remain unconscious. Clark saw the brain as travelling light, taking in only the news, only what it needed for its next move; but Hohwy saw how much heavy mental equipment was necessary to process even the briefest glance or touch. In 2008, Clark came across an article in New Scientist that described what purported to be a unified theory of the brain. Free energy, as Friston defined it, was roughly equivalent to what Clark called prediction error; and the brain’s need to minimize free energy, or minimize prediction error, Friston believed, drove everything the brain did.

Hygge can be used as a noun, adjective or verb, and events and places can also be hyggelige. Hygge is sometimes translated as “Cozy,” but a better definition of hygge is “Intentional intimacy,” which can happen when you have safe, balanced, and harmonious shared experiences. A family might have a hygge evening that entails board games and treats, or friends might get together for a casual dinner with dimmed lighting, good food and easygoing fun. Research on hygge has found that in Denmark, it’s integral to people’s sense of well-being. In a highly individualized country like Denmark, hygge can promote egalitarianism and strengthen trust. Google trends data show a big jump in searches for hygge beginning in October 2016. In the US-which also places a high value on individualism-there’s no real cultural equivalent of hygge. At its core, hygge is about building intimacy and trust with others.

Overstretched Cities is an in-depth look at how urbanisation has seen cities all over the world mushroom in size, putting new strain on infrastructure and resources – but in some cases offering hope for a more sustainable relationship with the natural world. If Nigeria’s population continues to grow and people move to cities at the same rate as now, Lagos could become the world’s largest metropolis, home to 85 or 100 million people. Under the researchers’ extreme scenario – where countries are unable to control fertility rates and urbanisation continues apace – within 35 years more than 100 cities will have populations larger than 5.5 million people. All the projections below are based on Hoornweg and Pope’s research paper Population predictions for the world’s largest cities in the 21st century. Bangalore is the worst city in the world for unchecked urbanisation. Today it has possibly 12 million and is predicted to be Africa’s second largest city with 75 million people inside 50 years. In just 30 years, nearly 500 million people have moved from rural areas into China’s 622 main cities, and a predominantly rural country has become nearly 60% urban. “Planning and thinking was geared to the idea that cars could circulate. Only 30% of Mexico City has a car, but the city was designed for the car. The 19th-century sanitary revolution has to be rethought. The environmental impacts of urbanisation are much worse outside cities.”

One of the most important things Peters says is this: the inner chimp is much more powerful than the inner human. Politics is for chimps; Twitter is for chimps; clickbait is for chimps. It’s a world geared to the chimp – or, in psychologist Walter Mischel’s terms, the “Hot system” of impulse, rather than the “Cool system” of taking stock, looking for evidence, thinking about what’s best in the long term. Your ‘inner chimp’ is grabby, jealous, greedy. Things have evolved to grab the chimp’s attention. As Steve Peters would say: allow time for the information to move beyond the chimp. You can let yourself feel your chimp’s emotions, and wait for them to pass. Why not just go for a couple of days? Why not? But that’s chimp maths.

In the modern era, ‘alienation’ really came into its own as a talismanic term in the 1950s and ’60s. At the time, the United States was becoming increasingly affluent, and earlier markers of oppression – poverty, inequality, social immobility, religious persecution – appeared to be on the wane. Why? Does the lexical decline of alienation suggest that the condition itself has been conquered – or merely that the context in which it made sense has now changed beyond recognition? After the Second World War, alienation came to betoken a near-universal spiritual and psychological malaise. In his so-called Paris Manuscripts, written in 1844 but only discovered between the two world wars, Marx developed a three-pronged critique of the alienation of labour – the source, he claimed, of all other alienations in the capitalist world. In Marx’s taxonomy of alienation, first came the worker’s loss of control over the product of his or her labour, which was sold as a commodity in the marketplace for the profit of the capitalist. Alienation could suggest, among other things, the domination of the subject by the object, the self by the other, the organic by the mechanical, and the living by the dead. Understood psychologically, socially, religiously or philosophically, it was a painful obstacle to feeling whole or at one with the world. Such arguments were still rooted in the idea that alienation was a pathological condition, one that ultimately needed to be redressed. In short, alienation in the second decade of the 21st century has not actually faded away as a descriptor of human distress.

“But if the universe is big enough, then when observers do show up on some very, very rare planets, they’ll look at the record of meteor impacts and disasters and say, ‘The universe looks pretty safe!’ But the problem is, of course, that their existence depends on them being very, very lucky. They’re actually living in an unsafe universe and next Tuesday they might get a very nasty surprise.” “So now you can imagine a world where the probability per year of nuclear war is actually 50 percent. So then the first year, the first half of worlds get nuked. Then the next year half of those survivor worlds get nuked. And so on. So in this very scary scenario-still after 70 years-if you have a big enough universe or many parallel universes, you’re still going to have some observers [left over] who say ‘Hey! It looks like we’re pretty safe!’ And again they will get a very nasty surprise when the nukes start flying.” Anthony Aguirre, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, thinks the fact that the universe has already lasted as long as it has could be the strangest product of observer selection effects of all. Though the end of the universe is typically thought of as a slow unraveling in the far future-the eternal dissipation into darkness after our brief springtime, leading to a cold, empty epoch that will stretch into forever-the universe could also end violently, Aguirre says, and at any time. Just as observers never show up on worlds that are quickly destroyed, they also don’t appear in universes that quickly unravel. One of the leading interpretations of this quantum weirdness is that all of the possible realities for the particle that were winnowed away in this act of observation actually are realized somewhere in branching-off parallel universes, by observers in parallel universes-parallel universes just as real as the one in which we happen to live. If the observer selection bias applies to our own lives, then perhaps we’re constantly being censored to the end of the universe. Maybe we live in a sort of Zamperini universe, owing our existence to a vast looming shadow of unseen, broken worlds.

“But if the universe is big enough, then when observers do show up on some very, very rare planets, they’ll look at the record of meteor impacts and disasters and say, ‘The universe looks pretty safe!’ But the problem is, of course, that their existence depends on them being very, very lucky. They’re actually living in an unsafe universe and next Tuesday they might get a very nasty surprise.” “So now you can imagine a world where the probability per year of nuclear war is actually 50 percent. So then the first year, the first half of worlds get nuked. Then the next year half of those survivor worlds get nuked. And so on. So in this very scary scenario-still after 70 years-if you have a big enough universe or many parallel universes, you’re still going to have some observers [left over] who say ‘Hey! It looks like we’re pretty safe!’ And again they will get a very nasty surprise when the nukes start flying.” Anthony Aguirre, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, thinks the fact that the universe has already lasted as long as it has could be the strangest product of observer selection effects of all. Though the end of the universe is typically thought of as a slow unraveling in the far future-the eternal dissipation into darkness after our brief springtime, leading to a cold, empty epoch that will stretch into forever-the universe could also end violently, Aguirre says, and at any time. Just as observers never show up on worlds that are quickly destroyed, they also don’t appear in universes that quickly unravel. One of the leading interpretations of this quantum weirdness is that all of the possible realities for the particle that were winnowed away in this act of observation actually are realized somewhere in branching-off parallel universes, by observers in parallel universes-parallel universes just as real as the one in which we happen to live. If the observer selection bias applies to our own lives, then perhaps we’re constantly being censored to the end of the universe. Maybe we live in a sort of Zamperini universe, owing our existence to a vast looming shadow of unseen, broken worlds.

An echo of peace permeates the city, emanating from the many ornate Buddhist temples lying within the old city walls. Your riad costs you just over $400 a month, and you navigate the city with a monthly rail pass that you bought for just about $15. The exchange rate sits at.11 cents for every Moroccan Dirham, so you’ll have a large budget for weekend spa tratments at the hamams. You could eat a full meal at a restaurant there for just $4, get yourself a nice bottle of wine for just $10, navigate the city for just $21 per month and rent a three-bedroom apartment in the heart of the city center for just over $500 a month. Though the city is notorious for having been the murder capital of the world during the reign of terror of Pablo Escobar, crime rates have dropped significantly in the years since his death. The city champions culture by way of art and gastronomy-you could eat a nice meal at a restaurant for just $2 or cook at home in your $300-ish apartment in the center of it all. Getting around the city is simple, too, since La Paz boasts the world’s longest and highest urban cable car network, the Mi Teleférico. The Vltava River bisects this capital city, nicknamed “The City of a Hundred Spires” for its tapering conical and pyramidal skyscrapers. Prague is actually ranked number 44 on the Nomad Index of the best cities in the world for expats.